Exercises in Style: Pekar-esque
Posted by JamesDougan on Tuesday, February 12 2008 at 1:09 am
There are many, many ways to tell a story, especially in the comics medium. Few people have thought about the different ways to tell a story in comics than Matt Madden,whether it’s through his own comics, in his work as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts, his website promoting the exploration of comics formalism at Exercises in Style, or the excellent book version of same, 99 Ways to Tell A Story. The idea with these experiments is that there are literally dozens of ways to approach the telling of even a relatively simple incident, in this case someone responding to a request for the time and then opening the refrigerator. Being a geek for comics formalism, this stuff just makes all my chromosomes stand on end.
One the more…unique ways I’ve seen of presenting a story in comics is the way Harvey Pekar does it. Anyone who has seen the movie version of AMERICAN SPLENDOR is familiar with how Harvey writes his scripts. A few boxes, text written in pencil, with the occasional stick figure to supply panel description. You know, like this.
Thus, without further ado, I present the latest Exercise, entitled “Pekar-esque”:
Matt has been gracious enough to offer to include this on the Guest Artist page of the EiS website, so thanks to him for that. Now, this being The Chemistry Set and all - anyone out there interested in giving a shot at drawing this? If so, please leave a comment here or drop me a line at chatterbox DOT comix AT gmail DOT com. (Matt’s expressed a willingness to post that effort at the EiS blog as well, if that sweetens the deal.)
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